Analyzing market changes to understand the effect on your business and the decisions you make

Strategic planning involves predicting how markets are likely to evolve and how your company can insert assets or businesses into those markets. Corporate strategy operates at a higher level than specific plants or assets; its goal is to achieve margin-producing businesses. Achieving this goal depends on corporate planners understanding (for their current and prospective businesses) such factors as:

Location (geography)

Commodity (oil, gas, NGLs, power, emission prices, and renewables)

Technology (conventional and unconventional)

Geology (resources in place, development cost)

Asset mix (what is the optimal asset mix)

Changing regulatory conditions and their implications

Price and basis

Understanding these factors is a formidable task and dramatically more difficult in the future time frame of strategic corporate decision making. The resulting market behavior might vary considerably depending on which possible future market changes actually occur.

What's needed is a way to analyze these factors together with the ability to apply combinations of potential market changes (price, quantity, and capacity additions) to enable what-if analysis and compare the various outcomes.

For example, you might examine corporate strategies such as:

Should we consider entering South American heavy oil production?

Should we acquire merchant or regulated generation units in the Eastern Interconnection?

Should we buy companies or build new assets?

Should we expand or maintain our current business in the Caspian upstream?

These decisions might be considerably different depending on evolving market changes.

MarketBuilder was designed to help companies perform the analysis for such decisions. It has many differentiating capabilities that facilitate analyzing markets globally or regionally and altering selected factors to help customers examine the combined effects of potential market changes on market behavior and prices.

Specifically, MarketBuilder models the supply chains for the energy commodities pertinent to your analysis. In MarketBuilder, each component of the supply chains is treated as an independent agent, competing against the others, as they do in real-world markets, helping users to analyze market fundamentals and project prices, simulating the real-world market behavior under a variety of potential conditions. MarketBuilder helps you place markets and impacts at the center of your strategic planning, make decisions, and justify them based on good information and a time-tested methodology.